Explanation of my lessons

 

The lessons I have posted on my blog are very simple. Many of the lessons consist of only a few lines.

The lessons are designed to get the dyslexic/disengaged students back on track. They had disengaged from learning due to confusion as a result of the reasons explained in my post at LINK.

These lessons ensure that any disengaged student will soon learn the correct pronunciation of the consonants and also learn that letters represent more than one sound. This is the basic idea of my lessons.

The idea is to get the disengaged kids to unlearn what they have been taught wrongly.

Why many kids shut down from learning to read

Yesterday I realised that two of my YouTube videos produced to explain why many kids disengage from learning to read are not easily accessed by interested parents.

I urge parents with kids who have shown a disinterest in learning to read in English to listen to the videos below. 

Reflective Practice

Here is a comment I received on my article on Winning and Losing and discovery in my blog. The same post can be found here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/winning-losing-discovery-luqman-michel/

Speaking out

This post is in response to a post in a blog I read. It is a prelude to what I intend to write this Sunday on some of our so called experts like Andrew Johnson, David Boulton, Reid Lyon, Timothy Shanahan and a few others.

All these guys are just too naïve to connect the dots.OR are they the puppets of some people with a vested interest?

 

Dyslexia OR Shut-Down Learner (Part 3)

I don’t like the word dyslexic as it does not have a definite meaning. I prefer to use the word shut-down learners or Disengaged Students. These are the type of students who have come to me. I have yet to see a student who has the following difficulties:

·         Problems processing and understanding what he or she hears

·         Inability to sound out the pronunciation of an unfamiliar words

·         Difficulty learning the names of letters or the sounds of the alphabet, numbers

·         Difficulty learning to say the alphabet in the correct order or counting to 10 correctly.

·         Difficulty with "phonemic awareness"

·         Complain of feeling or seeing non-existent movement while reading

·         Visual disturbances when reading – for example, a child may describe letters and words as seeming to move around or appear blurred

Disengaged students – The Problem

Go to any school you choose and speak with the English language teacher or with the superintendent. Ask him/her if there are students who do well in mathematics but are unable to read in English. 

All schools have at least 10% of kids who leave school without being able to read. The question is to ask as to why this is the case.

Also ask as to how I dare say that I can teach Jill to study after one minute of interacting with her. All I did was talk to Jim and Jane for about 20 minutes and then for less than a minute asked Jill to read a few alphabets written on a sheet of paper. After the one minute with Jill I knew she was a shut down learner.

After my first lesson with Jill I have confidently confirmed that I can get Jill to read at grade level within 4 months. I leave you with these questions to ponder and ask yourself as to why kids are not taught in a way that they ought to be taught. Why kids are not taught in a way whereby the illiteracy level will be reduced drastically? 

Disengaged student – A case study

I have written many articles on the Americans and British as well as Australians and New Zealanders grouping any and all children who have difficulty reading as ‘dyslexics’. The Americans and British say that most of the dyslexics have a ‘phonological awareness deficit’ which I believe is erroneous. I have written many posts on this in my blog as well.

I had stopped teaching for about a year and the one student that we have is taught by my wife. On 5.2.2017 someone (let’s call him Jim) telephoned me and asked me to evaluate his daughter to find out as to why she cannot read. I agreed stating that I only deal with disengaged/ shut down students and will be able to find out in a one hour session.

On 9.2.2017 Jim and his wife (let us call her Jane) brought their daughter Jill (not her real name) to my house. Jim explained that Jill is smart and when she talks will talk incessantly just like her mother. On this day Jill hardly opened her mouth. Jim said that Jill will not sit with him to read any material he reads to her. Within a minute or so she would walk away from reading. Jill was not interested in reading at all said Jim.

Jane told me that Jill was made the monitor of the class when she went into primary one after 2 years in a kindergarten. However, her badge was removed when the teacher found out that she could not read.

I asked Jill if she would like to learn to read and be as good as her classmates. She nodded her head giving me the first indication that she could be a disengaged student. Disengaged students do not want to be left out and would do whatever they can to be as good as their classmates if not better.

I then asked Jill to read a list of alphabets I had written on a piece of paper. The first line was written in large fonts and I had five lines of alphabets gradually becoming smaller and smaller until the last line was of the size of those in children’s books. She read all of the alphabets correctly.

I did that exercise just as a crude way of finding out is she had eyesight problem. This confirmed that she had no such problem.

I had expected her to read the names of the alphabets but (fortunately) she read she sound of the alphabets instead. This was just a one minute exercise. It, however, confirmed that her problem is that of a disengaged student.

She, like many kids in kindergarten and tuition centres had been taught the alphabet sounds (phonics) in the wrong way. She sounded out the following consonants in the following way:

M as Mur/Mer

S as Sur/Sir

T as Ter/Tur etc

As explained, elsewhere in my blog, this is one of the reasons a majority of the ‘so called dyslexic children’ shut down or disengage from studying. If not corrected they will lose their self esteem and end up being disruptive in class and then will be called stupid/ lazy by other students and sometimes by the teachers.

I told Jim and Jane that I will try and get her to read within 4 months of one hour lesson 3 times per week.

I will commence teaching on 14.3.2017 and write a summary of what happens so that parents of similar kids may be able to benefit.

There are about 10 to 20 percent of kids in the world who are unable to read and a majority of such students are actually smart kids who have shut down because of wrong methods of teaching.

Please inform parents of kids who may have such reading problems.

Family words

On 15.3.2016 I had written about how you can write your own book for your disengaged child.
I gave you an example of how to write using the family word 'at' as in bat, cat, fat etc.

You may get a list of family words from the following free site and write your book as I have explained.

Please ask any questions you may have in the comment section below to clear your doubts.

Get the family words from this site.

I started with 'at' and then moved onto 'an', 'ot' and so on.

Disengaged students - A comment from a friend

My friend and former boss Mr. Kandiah Namas had commented in my post yesterday. I have copied it below for your reading pleasure.

We have to ask ourselves as to why there are no disengaged students in the Tamil language. The simple answer is that, like my friend has put it, no two persons in the world will pronounce a word differently from another if he has been taught the Tamil alphabets properly.

Q&A on Disengaged Students

The following is a Face Book Q&A between my former employer Mr.Kandiah Namasivayam and myself.

Kandiah:

Luqman, some Kids shut down while Learning English. Others don't. Why? That is the million dollar question. It is obvious to you. But when some kids have no problem why only some kids shut down? So the entire blame cannot be put on English and its teaching method. Obviously there is more to it than what is apparent. Now I wonder why kids turn off when watching Sesame Street? There could be many reasons, one being distraction or attention deficiency syndrome. How do you connect the former to this one?

Confessions of a Teacher

                                                     

The following is part of a comment on LinkedIn in a forum I am participating in.

 "I`m told that to be polite is important but when it harms innocent children and puts their teachers into further instructional confusion-it irritates me to no end......there is barely a whimper of "how to teach reading" in the early grades. The factory of labeling the victim is still in place, I think 99% of the problems are dysteachia brought on by outdated teacher licensing institutions!" (Jo-Anne Gross)

 

Since 2010 I have been saying that the majority of kids leaving school as illiterates are casualties of teaching. It starts in kindergarten where letter sounds/phonemes are taught wrongly.

Disengaged students

                                     

                                          

I prefer the term disengaged/disconnected/shut-down students to dyslexic students. The term dyslexia is being misused by people with vested interest to include many conditions that would be best excluded from the dyslexia definition. For instance, kids with auditory processing difficulties, kids with acuity problems, kids with neurological problems, and kids with sight problems should all be excluded from the dyslexia umbrella.

I have reasons for wanting to differentiate between individuals who are said to be ‘dyslexic’ and disengaged students. Problems faced by disengaged students can be 1) prevented and 2) overcome as disengaged students are a result of schooling-caused teaching problems. Disengaged students form, I believe, a majority of kids who leave school as illiterates.

Dyslexia - Why kids shut down

                                                                      

Teachers teach us the sounds/phonemes of the alphabet as: A apple, B bed, C cat, D dog E elephant and so on. Everyone will and can learn this with no problem at all.

Then when they start teaching us to read, the NIGHTMARE begins for the 20% of kids who are later considered stupid or lazy. These kids are neither stupid nor are they lazy. These are the kids who need to be instructed explicitly on anything different from what they have been taught. These are the kids who ‘shut down’ when they are confused.

List of learning disabilities

The web site of Learning Disabilities Association of America is: http://ldaamerica.org/

The Learning Disability Association of America has the following listed under its learning

disability list:

• Auditory Processing Disorder
• Dyscalculia
• Dysgraphia
• Dyslexia
• Dyspraxia
• Language Processing Disorder
• Non-Verbal Learning Disabilities
• Visual Perceptual/Visual Motor Deficit
• Memory
• ADHD
• Executive Functioning

'Disengaged-students'

                                                                

‘Disengaged students’ or students who have ‘shut down’

All the 'dyslexic' students I have taught over the past 11 years have no problem reading in the Malay language. Those who study in Chinese schools can also read fluently in Romanised Chinese (Hanyu Pinyin).

I believe many children cannot read but do not have many of the problems included in many definitions of dyslexia on the internet. This web log is not for parents of kids who have a ‘Auditory Processing Disorder’ or acuity problem. This web log is for kids who cannot read in the English Language because they have shut down or disengaged themselves from what the teacher teaches. They disengage because the English language does not make sense to them. Kids shut-down when teachers do not teach these kids that many of the letters of the alphabet in the English language represent more than one phoneme (sound). As such a majority of the kids who end up being unable to read are simply kids who have shut down or disengaged from what is being taught because they have not been taught correctly.

Dyslexia - A new beginning...

A New Beginning

                                                            

When the world says, “Give up,” Hope whispers, “Try it one more time.”

 ~ Author Unknown

I had lost my blog title and could not renew my web log. My previous web log was at: www.parentingdyslexia.com. However, my son managed to retrieve the blog posts and we have opened a new account. I will post some of the previous posts as we go along.

I have decided to write again as I am currently teaching a ‘learning disabled’ kid ( I don’t like that term but…) and I see the same pattern as in all my previous students. I think ‘Disengaged learners’ would better describe these students. They shut down when things taught to them do not make sense to them.